Ishmaelby Danial Quinn

NOTE: I am creating this page largely for my own education. I have found that there is no better way to internalize (really thoroughly learn) something that trying to explain it to someone else. I am going to put that principle into play here by summarizing this book in my own words. But please understand - the power of Ishmael isn't just in the ideas. It's in the brilliance of Quinn's presentation of them.

If you rely on my summary to understand this book, you will miss out on the effect of Quinn's unique Super Power - the ability to bring you to an idea so that by the end of the book it is truly and completely yours: The ability to change you at a fundamental level.

The What, Why and the How - An Introduction

(With a book this life changing, there is great value in understanding how the book itself came to be. Quinn begins writes a Forward which does this. I often skip Forwards, as I like to take books on their own merits and not clutter up the experience with the author's thoughts outside of the manuscript. But in this case, I found his explanation of how this book came about not only interesting, but useful in organizing my understanding of what the book says.)​

​Throughout his life, Quinn found himself puzzled by two questions about our society:

​Humans have been living on this earth for over 3 million years, but when studying "human" history, we only focuses on the last 10,000 years. We seem to have a an unspoken agreement that nothing important happened during the first 99.7% of human history. Why is that? (click here for more discussion of this point)

The three beginning stories in the book of Genesis don't make sense. Not as in, scientifically: Quinn is happy to look at these stories as mythology - a metaphor or an origin story, representing essential things about our cultural world view. But what he saw - and after him pointing it out I realized I have always seen it too, but just unconsciously assumed I must be wrong - is that these stories don't make sense in those ways either. They don't represent our cultural world view (or the cultural world view of our ancestors: the original culture whose story is told in the Bible). They actually contradict it. Why is that? (click here for more discussion of this point)

Quinn began looking for an explanation of these two oddities early in his life, and along the way he found that the questions - and the answers - were related. He spent 20 years trying to work out the details of what the answers to these questions revealed to him, and how to show what he had learned to others. The result of those years is Ishmael.

The Plot

The importance of the book, Ishmael, is not in the story or the plot or the characters. It's in the ideas Quinn presents. But to fully understand the ideas, you need to walk with Quinn through the plot of the story he has written.

In the first chapter he introduces the main character - a disillusioned man who comes across an ad in the newspaper reading: TEACHER seeks pupil. Must have an earnest desire to save the world. At first he is angry because it is exactly this kind of teacher he desperately needed as he came of age in the aftermath of the 60's and watched the children's revolt of the 60's "dwindle away into a fashion statement." Never having found any way to reconcile his awareness that something was very wrong with the world or channel his earnest desire to do something about it, he had settled into bitterness. Now, when a teacher claims to present himself, he is cynical and resentful.

SPOILER ALERT: This paragraph tells you how the story ends. Skip it if you want! None-the-less, he goes to meet the teacher and he finds, not a man, but a gorilla with the ability to speak telepathically with humans. This gorilla begins teaching him and the rest of the story is a record of their conversation - the actual meat of the book. At the end of the book, the gorilla, unable to control his own destiny after his erstwhile "owner" dies, is sold to a traveling circus. The man searches him out and attempts to buy him but is too late: by the time he finally gets the money together, the gorilla has died of pneumonia and the story ends.

The Ideas

Again, let me reiterate that you cannot understand these ideas by reading my summary of them. Read the book. You need to hear Quinn's words, not mine, to fully understand what is being said. You certainly need to hear them from him if you are to believe them - Quinn presents these ideas in such a way as to address all of your doubts and questions beautifully and very completely.

Interesting thoughts not essential to the primary topic:

...where animals are simply penned up, they are almost always more thoughtful than their cousins int he wild. This is because even the dimmest of them cannot help but sense that something is very wrong with this style of living...Why?...the tiger asks itself hour after hour...as it treads its endless path behind the bars of its cage...If you were somehow able to ask the creature, "Why what?" it would be unable to answer you. Nevertheless this question burns...inflicting a searing pain that does not diminish...And of course this questioning is something that no tiger does in its normal habitat. - Ishmael pg. 12

Here in the zoo there were other gorillas--but there was no family. Five severed fingers do not make a family. - Ishmael pg. 13

[in the wild] one does not think of feeding as a distinct activity at all. Rather, it is like a delicious music that plays in the background of all activities throughout the day. - Ishmael pg. 13

If I understood what made up animals (and I thought I did) I couldn't understand what made them not animals. - Ishmael pg. 16

There are times when having too much to say can be as dumfounding as having too little. - pg. 27

What He Teaches

Ishmael claims expertise in teaching about Captivity and claims this is what he is going to teach about.